I been watching a NH route for award availability. On the evening of April 23, NH made daily that route, which it was previously serving 3x weekly. NH and AC can see award inventory (2x economy, 1x business) on the newly added NH flights. UA couldn't see the new flight at all. Neither does ITA/Google Flights. My guess was that that Amadeus subscribers will see the flight first, and I was waiting for availability to sync to UA so I can book it.

Before UA could see the availability, all the newly added flights had 2x economy available throughout the summer.

Availability synced to UA sometime in the last 7 hours, in the early morning hours of April 25. Immediately, 3 months' worth of economy award seats on that NH route disappeared within a few hours. I checked last night--plenty of seats and no availability on UA, this morning, UA availability and no more economy seats (there's still 1x business seat for the flight on most days).

I don't think these are real bookings. I think it's a ticket scalper (or group of scalpers) that are using United MP miles to buy up the seats speculatively (knowing that they can refund them for free, unlike Aeroplan, which is why the availability didn't change when only Aeroplan showed availability). Then, once the scalper has a customer for a specific date, they'll refund the placeholder ticket (NH generally returns the award inventory to the pool instantly), and immediately rebook with the scalper's customer's data.

Is there someone at UA that I can report this to, that will investigate this seriously? It should be fairly obvious since it would be a bunch of 2x economy seat bookings, all on the same route made at the same time, for dozens of dates.